Contract Tests
Capturing what consumers actually use, not what the API documents.
3 to work through
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intermediate
How does contract testing let two teams deploy independently, and what does it not tell you?
2 min answer -
advanced Multiple choice
A developer-tools vendor of JetBrains' shape publishes a plugin API used by several thousand third-party plugins it does not control and cannot enumerate. An architect proposes consumer-driven contract tests. Which approach actually protects a release?
3 min answer -
advanced
Consumer-driven contract testing is technically sound but adoption stalls. What organisational conditions does it require?
2 min answer
2 terms in this topic
Bidirectional Contract
A contract verified from both sides — the consumer's expectations and the provider's actual behaviour — without either running the other's tests directly.
practiceSoftware Contract Tests
Verifying an interaction between two components from both sides independently, so integration confidence does not require deploying both.
Neighbouring topics
Software Architecture
General material on the engineering underneath an architecture.
SOLID
Five design principles, two of which scale beyond the class.
Domain-Driven Design
Ubiquitous language, bounded contexts and context mapping.
Bounded Contexts
Where one model ends and another begins, and why forcing one fails.
Clean Architecture
Concentric layers with dependencies pointing only inwards.
Hexagonal Architecture
Ports defined by the domain, adapters supplied by infrastructure.
Microservices
Independent deployability, and the distributed problems it buys.
Modular Monolith
Enforced internal boundaries without a network between them.
Service Boundaries
Drawing lines along change patterns rather than technical layers.
Design Patterns
Reusable solutions at code level, and when they become ceremony.
Refactoring
Changing structure without changing behaviour, in verified steps.
Technical Debt
Deliberate, tracked and repaid — as distinct from mess.
Testing Strategies
The pyramid, and the contract tests distributed systems add to it.
CI/CD
Continuous integration and delivery, and the architecture that caps them.
Release Strategies
Blue-green, canary, shadow and progressive delivery.
Feature Flags
Decoupling deploy from release, with an expiry date.
Trunk-Based Development
Short-lived branches, and unmerged work as inventory.
Code Review
Where architectural rules are enforced by people rather than by tools.
DORA Metrics
Throughput and stability moving together rather than trading off.